Deliver Us - Original

Deliver Us

Generations in bondage our people has suffered,
A lifetime of whips with little joy offered.
Mud and water, straw and sand,
Our people, like beasts, have carved this land.
Deliver us, deliver us.

We gather at night for a silent prayer
Hoping against hope for an end to our despair.
Parents comfort their babies so that they won’t cry,
But parents will shed a tear as they utter a broken lullaby.
Deliver us, deliver us.

We are broken, we have nothing to give,
We are mere men asking for a chance to live.
The malice of slavery grows too cruel to stand,
The only thing left for us is your promised land.
Deliver us, deliver us.


Explication:
This poem is written using rhyming couplets, plus a repeated line at the end of every stanza. It describes the anguish of the Hebrew people during their time of bondage under the Egyptian rulers. It is from a Hebrew slave’s perspective, and he speaks of a lifetime of suffering, a sense of helplessness, and a slim hope for his God to free them. “Generations” and “a lifetime” both describe the duration of the suffering. The day involves nothing but work, lugging enormous bricks up and down the temples and pyramids. At night, the people do not dare to make a sound, and can only pray silently to their God. Parent try to comfort their children, while in need of comfort themselves. The last stanza is a plea for the God to save the Hebrew people.
I used repetition at the end of every stanza, to stress the only thing that the Hebrew people were thinking about: to be freed. It is an accentual verse: there are 4 beats to a line. Because the narrator is speaking to God, there is use of apostrophe. “Our people like beasts” is an example of simile. Lastly, the entire poem of course is an allusion to the stories from the bible.
This poem fits the theme as it describes a possible reason for war.